Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday July 20, 2012 @10:34AM
from the a-pox-on-anyone-uttering-the-word-phablet dept.

New submitter Steve Max writes "Editor Paul Ockenden wonders, 'Has anyone else noticed what's been happening to top-end smartphones recently? They've started to get big – really big. But do people really want that at the expense of carrying around such a huge, heavy lump of tech in their pocket?' The trend for biggerandbiggerscreens is clear, but is it what consumers want? Is it what you want?"

Your post is immediately more interesting than the linked article, because you actually claim experience with a larger device, albeit an archaic one that hardly resembles the smart phones the author is bemoaning.

Ockenden criticizes this 'growing' trend, quotes some twitter users criticizing the trend, and then concludes that the manufacturers of these smart phones don't know anything about their market, because consumers obviously want the old phones; great battery life and diminutive size are obviously all that matter.

This article would have been far more interesting had he actually claimed to have tried one of these newer bigger phones, or at least talked to somebody who has. I carry a Samsung Galaxy Note for work, and the biggest reservation I had coming from the much smaller HTC Desire, was its huge size and potential to eat battery life--the same concerns mentioned by Ockenden. Having read some reviews and seeing that the reviewers quickly overcame the same concerns after very short time with their Notes, I decided to take the plunge. Honesly, it took no time to get used to the size, and whenever I hold a smaller phone I'm amazed that anybody can find them useful for anything, and the battery life is at least as good as the Desire.

If they came out with a "1/2" SIM card that let me put the same SIM in 2 different devices and if one was powered on while the other was still on I'd get an error message I would be all over that. I know I could buy another account but that'd cost me another $50+ a month.

So people are choosing the worst of both worlds. It's not a phone and it's not a tablet.

Here in Norway you can have twin cards on the same subscription... if you call your numbers, both phones call. SMSes reach both devices - and both devices are attached to the same subscription.

Sometimes there is a fee (I'm paying $3 a month for it), but it is nowhere near the fees for a second subscription.